All of David Gross's Comments + Replies

The sequence is rationality-informed but also picks up things from folk wisdom, religious traditions, etc. when that seems helpful. It references cogsci studies and insights when those are available.

This might scratch your itch: the Notes on Virtues sequence.

Investigating a variety of human virtues, with the hope of learning how we might improve in their practice.

1Benjamin Hendricks
Delightfully lengthy! Out of curiosity, to what degree are rationality and/or cognitive science relied on? Material focusing on that is especially what I'm looking for, with I'll probably check it out regardless.

In Firefox, you can hover over the timestamp next to the name of the commenter, right-click (or whatever it is you Mac people do), and select Bookmark Link... to bookmark a comment.

Alternatively, you can click on the timestamp and then use whatever mechanism your OS/Browser allows to bookmark the page you go to as a result of the click.

I posit: high enough that you’re slightly overoptimistic about stuff you can’t control, so that for stuff where confidence itself makes the difference, you squeak in.

 

FWIW, see Notes on Optimism, Hope, and Trust for more on this hypothesis, including William James's speculations.

All this sounds wonderful, but reminds me of people who have amazing systems to play the stock market and leverage $1,000 to $1,000,000. Of all the people with all their systems, a few lucky ones hit the jackpot by chance, while the majority muddle through or lose it all. The lucky ones assume the market has acknowledged their financial genius and go on to tell us all about it.

If 5% of glioblastoma patients uncannily survive, how much am I supposed to update on hearing that one of those patients did some combination of plausible but undertested interventions during their recovery?

8DenizT
Only 1 way to figure out: test it on (consenting) new patients. The drugs are generic (so cheap), and don't have intolerable side effects. It has anecdotally worked. So it's positive EV for patients with terminal prognosis. And yet its explained away as a curious  'spontaneous' remission, using your very valid objection. This is after all my bigger claim / criticism of the status quo. My objective is to make a meta-level criticism more so than to advocate for one particular protocol as the potential cure. My claim is that a medical system that acted with urgency and that wanted to maximize patient survival odds, would have at the very least attempted to replicate the protocol in a Phase II clinical trial. Instead, it was ignored due to status quo bias. Not because it lacked a scientific justification, but because the drugs are generic.  In other words, I use the lack of a replication attempt to update in favor of systemic issues in oncology and FDA.

A prereminiscence: It's like it was with chess. We passed through that stage when AI could beat most of us to where it obviously outperforms all of us. Only for cultural output in general. People still think now, but privately, in the shower, or in quaint artisanal forms as if we were making our own yogurts or weaving our own clothes. Human-produced works are now a genre with a dwindling and eccentric fan base more concerned with the process than the product.

It was like the tide coming in. One day it was cutely, clumsily trying to mimic that thing we do. S... (read more)

4Sherrinford
"But nowadays curiosity was déclassé. It suggested laziness (why not just ask it?)…" I think that does not work. Asking is easy, so asking is the lazy option.

The book in the Chinese Room directs the actions of the little man in the room. Without the book, the man doesn't act, and the text doesn't get translated.

The popcorn map on the other hand doesn't direct the popcorn to do what it does. The popcorn does what it does, and then the map in a post-hoc way is generated to explain how what the popcorn did maps to some particular calculation.

You can say that "oh well, then, the popcorn wasn't really conscious until the map was generated; it was the additional calculations that went into generating the map that rea... (read more)

The book in the room isn't inert, though. It instructs the little guy on what to do as he manipulates symbols and stuff. As such, it is an important part of the computation that takes place.

The mapping of popcorn-to-computation, though, doesn't do anything equivalent to this. It's just an off-to-the-side interpretation of what is happening in the popcorn: it does nothing to move the popcorn or cause it to be configured in such a way. It doesn't have to even exist: if you just know that in theory there is a way to map the popcorn to the computation, then if... (read more)

2Nathan Helm-Burger
That doesn't quite follow to me. The book seems just as inert as the popcorn-to-consciousness map. The book doesn't change yhe incoming slip of paper (popcorn) in any way, it just responds with an inert static map yo result in an outgoing slip of paper (consciousness), utilizing the map-and-popcorn-analyzing-agent-who-lacks-understanding (man in the room).

This reminds me of my intuitive rejection of the Chinese Room thought experiment, in which the intuition pump seems to rely on the little guy in the room not knowing Chinese, but that it's obviously the whole mechanism that is the room, the books in the room, etc. that is doing the "knowing" while the little guy is just a cog.

Part of what makes the rock/popcorn/wall thought experiment more appealing, even given your objections here, is that even if you imagine that you have offloaded the complex mapping somewhere else, the actual thinking-action that the m... (read more)

2Nathan Helm-Burger
I agree that the Chinese Room thought experiment dissolves into clarity once you realize that it is the room as a whole, not just the person, that implements the understanding. But then wouldn't the mapping, like the inert book in the room, need to be included in the system?

"the actual thinking-action that the mapping interprets"


I don't think this is conceptually correct. Looking at the chess playing waterfall that Aaronson discusses, the mapping itself is doing all of the computation. The fact that the mapping ran in the past doesn't change the fact that it's the location of the computation, any more than the fact that it takes milliseconds for my nerve impulses to reach my fingers means that my fingers are doing the thinking in writing this essay. (Though given the typos you found, it would be convenient to blame them.)

they

... (read more)

Crucially, the mappings to rocks or integers require the computation to be performed elsewhere to generate the mapping. Without the computation occurring externally, the mapping cannot be constructed, and thus, it is misleading to claim that the computation happens 'in' the rock or the integers. Further, Crucially, the mappings to rocks or integers require the computation to be performed elsewhere to generate the mapping. Without the computation occurring externally, the mapping cannot be constructed, and thus, it is misleading to claim that the computation happens 'in' the rock or the integers.

 

Either this is saying the same thing twice or I'm seeing double.

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2Davidmanheim
Looks like I messed up cutting and pasting - thanks!

Tomasik dismisses this as ,

 

?

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
2Davidmanheim
Thanks - fixed!

The fundamental attribution error is another important one. I sometimes find I slip into it myself when I get tired or inattentive, but for most people I observe it seems fully baked into their characters.

More on gratitude, how it works, and how to best take advantage of it: Notes on Gratitude

2Seth Herd
Your post is vastly more complete. Nice work!

Wants are emergent, complex forms of pain and pleasure. They are either felt or they are not felt, and reason only comes in at the stage of deciding what to do about them.

 

Are you really certain that one's desires are just givens that one has no rational influence over? I'm skeptical.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aQQ69PijQR2Z64m2z/notes-on-temperance#Can_we_shape_our_desires_

7DaystarEld
I don't see how your question contradicts my statement, nor that link. People absolutely develop in their desires over time, and can change them, but that is not the same as being able to decide, in the moment, that you do not like the taste of pizza if your tongue is having the sensory experience of enjoying it.

An influential ethical philosopher is on his way to address a conference of wealthy donors about effective altruism. His rhetorical power and keen arguments are such that he can expect these donors to reach deep and double their donations to yet worthier causes after his talk. On his way to the conference, however, he comes across a child drowning in a pond. He is the only one around who can save this child, but to do so, he would have to jump in the pond, ruin his humble but respectable second-hand suit, and miss the train to the conference. While he woul... (read more)

A lot of the current education system aims to give children skills that they can apply to the job market as it existed 20 years ago or so. I think children would be better-advised to master more general skills that could be applied to a range of possible rapidly changing worlds: character skills like resilience, flexibility, industriousness, rationality, social responsibility, attention, caution, etc.

Come to think of it, such skills probably represent more reliable "investments" for us grown-ups too.

Can you give examples of curriculum elements that you think are aimed at the world of 20 years ago? The usual criticism I see is that school is barely connected to the needs of the working world.

Done. Thanks for the correction.

It seems plausible to me that there is a sort of selection process in which people are creating ostensible-wisdom all the time, but only some of that wisdom gets passed along to the next generation, and the next, and so forth, while a lot of it gets discarded. If some example of wisdom is indeed ancient, then you can by virtue of that have at least some evidence that it has passed through this selection process.

To what extent this selection process selects for wisdom that actually earns that designation I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

We taboo resemblance all the time for things that refer to other things: Words, for example. The word "mouse" does not resemble a mouse, but we can usefully use the word as a reference. Words that resemble their references are a peculiar and remarkable tiny category (onomatopoeia) that are the exception to the rule.

If you thought your computer interface were an accurate picture of what is going on inside the computer, you might indeed go looking for a microscopic pointer somewhere in the wires. It's because you don't think this that you know to look for co... (read more)

5AnthonyC
Ok, fair, I agree they do not resemble one another in this kind of way. That isn't how I was interpreting "resemblence." I was thinking of it as "correspondence." Minor off topic aside: While they are a small minority, I suspect onomatopoeia-like words are probably more common than we usually think. A lot of words resemble, to me, aspects of their referent, even if only in a synesthetic way, or only if you look at older forms of the word. Add that to things like the bouba/kiki effect, and I start to wonder how much we coin new words using some kind of felt, metaphorical sense of meanings corresponding to how sounds feel.

It's not nonsensical. It's an assertion that can be made sense of with a little effort.

Consider the user interface analogy. On your desktop there is a mouse pointer with which you can drag a file from here to there. In the underlying computer which executes the actions which are represented by this interface, there is nothing that resembles a pointer, a dragging action, or a file. That the interface associates certain activity in the hardware with certain things that appear on the desktop is a useful convention for us, but it is not one that was designed t... (read more)

2ProgramCrafter
Course' there are: probably 64 bits in memory (for more degree of detail: 64 places of persistent electric charge with two stable states), which change iff pointer moves, and each bit restricts the places pointer can appear at. That resemblance exists certainly; I also agree there's no resemblance like "small pointer-like thing/charge pattern in RAM module". In other words, one has to taboo "resemblance" but it's not clear if that can be done.

That, to me, reads like a very different statement. One I completely agree with. But different. I maintain that the very fact of the interface's usefulness demonstrates that there is enough of a resemblance to the underlying reality to create said usefulness - by giving us accurate expectations about selected aspects of the behavior of whatever is going on beneath the surface, while lowering mental overhead by abstracting away the rest.

Edit to add: side note, who says the word red has to be defined based on wavelengths in absolute terms instead of relation... (read more)

shame—no need to exacerbate such feelings if it can be avoided

 

Shame may be an important tool that people with dark traits can leverage to overcome those traits. Exacerbating it may in some cases be salutary. 

2David Althaus
Thanks, good point! I suppose it's a balancing act and depends on the specifics in question and the amount of shame we dole out. My hunch would be that a combination of empathy and shame ("carrot and stick") may be best.  

FWIW: I've added my summary of the answers here to my Notes on Industriousness.

To me, the phrase “I decided to trust her” throws an error. It’s the “decided” part that’s the problem: beliefs are not supposed to involve any “deciding”.

 

To trust is more than a passive cognitive reflection like a belief, it is also an action taken upon the world. This might be more easily seen if you consider the more awkward phrasing "I decided to extend my trust to her".

See e.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/62fx4bp4W2Bxn4bZJ/notes-on-optimism-hope-and-trust#Trust_vs__expectation_and_reliance 

“So convenient a thing to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.” ―Benjamin Franklin (Autobiography Ⅳ, 1791)

“[T]he majority of men do not think in order to know the truth, but in order to assure themselves that the life which they lead, and which is agreeable and habitual to them, is the one which coincides with the truth.” ―Tolstoy (The Kingdom of God Is Within You, 1894)

“[A]n aim of philosophy is patiently and unremittingly to sustain the vigilance of reason in the presence of failure and in the presence of that which seems alien to it.” ―Karl Jaspers (Way to Wisdom, 1950)

“He who knows the truth is not equal to him who loves it, and he who loves it is not equal to him who delights in it.” ―Confucius (Analects Ⅵ.18)

“The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.” —Thomas Macaulay (“Lord Bacon” 1837)

Some considerations you might be missing:

A language, among other things, is an ongoing, long-term, collective effort by a culture to categorize understanding: to divide up what is known, knowable, (or mistaken) into chunky abstractions that can then be played with lego-style to assemble new insights, hypotheses, or what-have-you.

Each language carves up reality a little differently.

When there are more languages in use, there are more versions of this carving at play. Some languages can easily express things that other languages cannot. Some languages make d... (read more)

1rotatingpaguro
I'm reminded of the recent review of How Language Began on ACX: the missionary linguist becomes an atheist because in the local very weird language they have declinations to indicate the source of what you are saying, and saying things about Jesus just doesn't click.
7SpectrumDT
I agree that the utility of preserving endangered languages is greater than zero. But how much greater. These alternative ways of conceptualizing... how useful are they? What can we achieve with them? As far as I can tell, they are fun and interesting, but insignificant compared to other problems we can help solve.

Anyone else getting "ask your doctor if Photoshop™ is right for you" vibes from some of those before & after photos?

...the fact that the average life in New Zealand is much, much better than the average life in the Democratic Republic of Congo...

 

I think you may be in danger of overloading "better" in statements like this, and more implicitly throughout your argument. (Similarly "good" in statements like "It’s absurd to... believe[] a life for a woman in Saudi Arabia is just as good as life for a woman in some other country with similarly high per capita income".)

Consider if I said something like this: "We are constantly told that it would be better for us if we at... (read more)

2vaishnav92
1. Thanks for the feedback. Thinking about it for a minute, it seems like your first point is more than just stylistic criticism. By "better" i meant we have strong intuitions about first person subjective experience, but i now realize the way I phrased it  might be begging the question.  2. Why do you think I'm making that assumption? I assume EAs care about all of these things with some reasonable exchange rate between all the three. Assuming you only care about  doesn't this bias you towards enhaving subjective experience, pain relief etc (eg. Give Directly,  Strong Minds etc) versus life saving interventions that might be barely net positive anyway, especially because things like malarial bed nets don't have other positive externalities (unlike something like deworming) I agree it's also an update towards any other things EAs could plausibly do, such as institutional imrprovements/human capital development etc.

If UBI is implemented as a form of wealth redistribution -- in other words if a progressive tax fully funds the UBI payouts -- then the money supply inflation problem goes away, no? At least on the economy-wide scale.

I guess there is still the problem that at the bottom of the income scale there is now more money chasing e.g. a stickily-fixed supply of low-income housing, so the prices of such goods are likely to rise. But might some of the people who used to compete for that stock of housing also now be UBI-boosted into setting their sights on higher-quality housing and no longer be part of that competitive pool? Maybe it evens out.

2Gordon Seidoh Worley
I think the problem you are describing at the bottom of the market is why I expect UBI not to work, because it will fail to do enough to subsidize demand to move anyone up in the market, resulting in a "wealth" transfer that only serves to reduce average purchasing power.

See also: Notes on Empathy for more suggestions and some of the research / theory behind them.

What I don't see in your outline, and what I think would make your proposed manifesto stronger, would be a chapter along the lines of "this is the steelmanned case for why continuing progress in technology is problematic and dangerous and for how humanity could prosper or avoid disaster by putting the brakes on it."

Otherwise it does look like a preaching to the choir thing. Manifestos are often that sort of preaching, so maybe that's okay for what you're after, but for all the usual LW-communications-ethos reasons, I hope you decide on something better.

I've seen dukkha translated as something more like "unsatisfactoriness" which puts a kind of Stoic spin on it. You look at the cards you've been dealt, and instead of playing them, you find them inadequate and get upset about it. The Stoics (and the Buddhists, in this interpretation) would recommend that you instead just play the cards you're dealt. They may not be great cards, but you won't make them any better by complaining about them. Dunno if this is authentic to Buddhism or is more the result of Westerners trying to find something familiar in Buddhism, though.

My point is that in English "experience such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain" would be considered an uncontroversial example of "suffering", not as something suffering-neutral to which suffering might or might not be added. I understand that in Buddhism there's a fine-grained distinction of some sort here, but it carries over poorly to English.

I expect that if you told a Buddhist-naive English-speaker "Buddhism teaches you how to never suffer ever again" they would assume you were claiming that this would i... (read more)

-1jbkjr
Sure, but I think that’s just because of the usual conflation between pain and suffering which I’m trying to address with this post. If you ask anyone with the relevant experience “does Buddhism teaching me to never suffer again mean that I’ll never experience (severe) pain again?”, they’ll just answer no. I don’t think it’s reasonable to think of this as a “bait-and-switch” because the dhamma never taught the end of pain, only the end of suffering; it’s not the dhamma’s fault if novices think the end of suffering means an end to pain.
2Viliam
So basically the Buddhist word that gets translated to English as suffering means something like "second-order (and higher) effects of pain (and other emotions)", while the natural meaning of the English word is more like "all effects of pain". The question is whether those are two different words in the original language, or it was a bait-and-switch from the very beginning.

There can be pain without suffering. If pain is experienced without attachment and aversion, there is no resulting suffering. If the Buddha were to stub his toe, there would be pain, but he would not suffer as a result.

 

I wonder whether "suffering" is an adequate translation. I get the feeling that the Buddhist sutras and our common vulgate are talking past each other. See for example MN144, in which Channa slits his wrists to end his pain, and the Buddha says he was sufficiently enlightened that he will not be reborn. Channa complains: “Reverend Sāri... (read more)

6Ulisse Mini
I think asking people like Daniel Ingram, Frank Yang, Nick Cammeratta, Shinzen Young, Roger Thisdell, etc. on how they experience pain post awakening is much more productive than debating 2500 year old teachings which have been (mis)translated many times.
1jbkjr
It seems a bit misguided to me to argue “well, even in the absence of suffering, one might experience such severe pain that one might prefer non-existence to continuing to endure that pain, so this ‘not suffering’ can’t be all it’s cracked up to be”—would you rather experience suffering on top of that pain? With or without pain, not suffering is preferable to suffering. For example, with end-of-life patients, circumstances being so unpleasant doesn’t mean that they may as well suffer, too; nor does “being an end-of-life patient” being a possible experience among the space of all possible non-suffering experiences make not suffering any less valuable. Acknowledging that not suffering is preferable to suffering, even in the presence of pain, doesn’t trivialize the reality of pain, which still feels bad!

Anselm: I have discovered a truly marvelous proof for the existence of God, which this tweet is too small to contain. 🙏😇

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HnNNGWQEX7CgaqBt2/notes-on-reverence

Excerpt:

“I am an atheist, and am addressing an audience in which, if I’m not mistaken, respect for the tenets of established religion is fairly low. But I want to explore reverence — in the spirit of Chesterton’s Fence — because it is common to many virtue systems across cultures and across time. Among the questions that concern me:

  • “Are there aspects of reverence that are valuable that rationalists can preserve and nurture in their own ways in their own traditions?
  • “Is reverence perhaps so
... (read more)

Took a couple of years, but my dystopian future has arrived:

May, 2024: Google search starts to put "AI Overviews" above its web search results. [BBC] "Google's new artificial intelligence (AI) search feature is facing criticism for providing erratic, inaccurate answers. Its experimental 'AI Overviews' tool has told some users searching for how to make cheese stick to pizza better that they could use 'non-toxic glue'. The search engine's AI-generated responses have also said geologists recommend humans eat one rock per day."

2the gears to ascension
the second one has an actual source though, so if you trust that source, maybe it's worth considering doing it

my current best guess

 

FWIW, from Iris Murdoch's Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (p. 323): "If we study one moral concept we soon see it as an aspect of another. It is true on the one hand that as moral agents we tend to specialise. The high-principled statesman may be a negligent father (and so on). It may seem as if we have a limited amount of good motivation available and cannot expect to be decent 'all round'. There are familiar ways of characterising people in terms of individual characteristics. Yet also a closer look may show this as superficial, and we then wish to say that the impulse toward goodness should stir the whole person."

Here 'tis: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/iofy4cWC9AWzZDtxc/notes-on-gracefulness

If you are worried that nobody obsessively overanalyzes the concept of love in a desperate search for something solid at the base of the concept, worry no longer.

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about how insight-frisson might be induced by psychedelics/marijuana in terms of your model. Anecdotally, these drugs seem to promote both a lot of false-positive insight-frisson experiences (the feeling of having an insight is vividly there, but the insight itself seems to dissolve upon inspection) and genuinely insightful insight-frisson experiences (a conceptual discrepancy you didn't even realize you had suddenly comes to light, and a way of resolving it follows soon after, in a way that endures beyond the acute drug experience).

2Emrik
I don't really know what psychedelics do in the brain, so I don't have a good answer. I'd note that, if psychedelics increases your brain's sensitivity wrt amplifying discrepancies, then this seems like a promising way to counterbalance biases in the negative direction (e.g. being too humble to think anything novel), even if it increases your false-positives. I think psychedelics probably don't work this way, but I'd like to try it anyway (if it were cheap) while thinking about specific topics I fear I might be tempted to fool myself about. I'd first spend some effort getting into the state where my brain wants to discover those discrepancies in the first place, and I'm extra-sceptical the drugs would work on their own without some mental preparation.

It sounds like you want to say things like "coherence and persistent similarity of structure in perceptions demonstrates that perceptions are representations of things external to the perceptions themselves" or "the idea that there is stuff out there seems the obvious explanation" or "explanations that work better than others are the best alternatives in the search for truth" and yet you also want to say "pish, philosophy is rubbish; I don't need to defend an opinion about realism or idealism or any of that nonsense". In fact what you're doing isn't some alternative to philosophy, but a variety of it.

2Richard_Kennaway
Some philosophy is rubbish. Quite a lot, I believe. And with a statement such as "perceptions are caused by things external to the perceptions themselves", which I find unremarkable in itself as a prima facie obvious hypothesis to run with, there is a tendency for philosophers to go off the rails immediately by inventing precise definitions of words such as "perceptions", "are", and "caused", and elaborating all manner of quibbles and paradoxes. Hence the whole tedious catalogue of realisms. Science did not get anywhere by speculating on whether there are four or five elements and arguing about their natures.

A hypothesis that explains the perceptions can be a just-so story. For any set of perceptions ζ, there may be a vast number of hypotheses that explain those perceptions. How do you choose among them?

In other words, if f() and g() both explain ζ equally well, but are incompatible in all sorts of other ways for which you do not have perceptions to distinguish them, ζ may be "evidence for the hypothesis" f and ζ may be "evidence for the hypothesis" g, but ζ offers no help in determining whether f or g is truer. Consider e.g. f is idealism, g is realism, or so... (read more)

2Richard_Kennaway
Dragging files around in a GUI is a familiar action that does known things with known consequences. Somewhere on the hard disc (or SSD, or somewhere in the cloud, etc.) there is indeed a "file" which has indeed been "moved" into a "folder", and taking off those quotation marks only requires some background knowledge (which in fact I have) of the lower-level things that are going on and which the GUI presents to me through this visual metaphor. Some explanations work better than others. The idea that there is stuff out there that gives rise to my perceptions, and which I can act on with predictable results, seems to me the obvious explanation that any other contender will have to do a great deal of work to topple from the plinth. The various philosophical arguments over doctrines such as "idealism", "realism", and so on are more like a musical recreation (see my other comment) than anything to take seriously as a search for truth. They are hardly the sort of thing that can be right or wrong, and to the extent that they are, they are all wrong. Ok, that's my personal view of a lot of philosophy, but I'm not the only one.

It's a characteristic of philosophy, too, at least according to the positivists. If you're humoring a metaphysical theory that could not even in theory be confirmed or falsified by some possible observation, they suggest that you're really engaging in mythmaking or poetry or something, not philosophy.

2TAG
Positivism isn't necessarily true, and if it is, it still doesn't get you to 6, because LP recommends you have no metaphysics which would imply no solipsistic metaphysics. (LP might be compatible with the claim that your own sense-data are all you can know , but that isn't quite the same thing).
2Richard_Kennaway
A lot of philosophy is like that. Or perhaps it is better compared to music. Music sounds meaningful, but no-one has explained what it means. Even so, much philosophy sounds meaningful, consisting of grammatical sentences with a sense of coherence, but actually meaning nothing. This is why there is no progress in philosophy, any more than there is in music. New forms can be invented and other forms can go out of fashion, but the only development is the ever-greater sprawl of the forest.

This is a brief follow-up to my post “Redirecting one’s own taxes as an effective altruism method.” Since I wrote that post:

  1. Scott Alexander boosted (not to be interpreted as endorsed) my post on Astral Codex Ten, which helped to give it more than typical reach.
  2. In a flinchy spasm of post-SBF timidity, GiveWell explicitly told me they did not want to get their hands dirty with my donations of redirected taxes any more.
  3. My tax arrears for 2013 ($5,932 original tax + ~$5,467 in interest & penalties) were annulled by the statute of limitations.
  4. I made a $5,93
... (read more)

According to Seigen Ishin (Ch'ing-yüan Wei-hsin):

"Before a man studies Zen, to him mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after he gets an insight into the truth of Zen through the instruction of a good master, mountains to him are not mountains and waters are not waters; but after this when he really attains to the abode of rest, mountains are once more mountains and waters are waters."

(D. T. Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, 1926, London; New York: Published for the Buddhist Society, London by Rider, p. 24.)

  1. We inhabit this real material world, the one which we perceive all around us (and which somehow gives rise to perceptive and self-conscious beings like us).
  2. Though not all of our perceptions conform to a real material world. We may be fooled by things like illusions or hallucinations or dreams that mimic perceptions of this world but are actually all in our minds.
  3. Indeed if you examine your perceptions closely, you'll see that none of them actually give you representations of the material world, but merely reactions to it.
  4. In fact, since the only evidence we
... (read more)
2Richard_Kennaway
In (3), the word “merely” is doing a lot of unexamined work. My perceptions have a coherence to them, an obstinate coherence that I cannot wish away. I reach out for the coffee cup that I see, and it shows up to my sense of touch. What does it mean to call this a “mere” response, when it maintains a persistent similarity of structure to my idea of what is out there—that is, it is a representation of it. In (4), if the hypothesis explains the perceptions, the perceptions are evidence for the hypothesis. These are two different ways of saying the same thing.
2TAG
There's a soft patch around 5 and 6. Why is testability important? It's a charactersitic of science, but science assumes an external world. It's not a characteristic of philosophy -- good explanation is enough in philosophy, and the general posit of some sort of external world does explanatory work. And it's separate from the specific posit that the external world is knowable in some particular way.
2David Gross
1lemonhope
Put your phone in the oven and stand in the grass and eat some grass and see how it tastes
2JBlack
What loop? They are all various viewpoints on the nature of reality, not steps you have to go through in some order or anything. (1) is a more useful viewpoint than the rest, and you can adopt that one for 99%+ of everything you think about and only care about the rest as basically ideas to toy with rather than live by. I don't know about you (assuming you even exist in any sense other than my perception of words on a screen), but to me a model that an external reality exists beyond what I can perceive is amazingly useful for essentially everything. Even if it might not be actually true, it explains my perceptions to a degree that seems incredible if it were not even partly true. Even most of the apparent exceptions in (2) are well explained by it once your physical model includes much of how perception works. So while (4) holds, it's to such a powerful degree that (2) to (6) are essentially identical to (1).
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